Why was this news?

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The size of the Vermont press — sorry, media — corps has become smaller and smaller in recent years. So small that it’s getting difficult for Vermont Public Television to find three “reporters” to fill out its Vermont This Week panel.

And yet, somehow, the Associated Press managed to shake someone loose to cover a rally on Thursday in Montpelier that attracted “about 20” people.

Not a misprint: “about 20.”

“About 20” people from a coalition of Tea Party-type groups — none of whom could muster anything more than token attendance — rallied in opposition to Democratic efforts at health care reform in Vermont.  

So I ask the editors of our media: How small does a right-wing protest have to be, for you to deem it unworthy of coverage? At what point do you tell your reporter, “Never mind, go dig up some real news”?

I mean, there was a hardy group of souls who staged a weekly antiwar picket in front of the Montpelier post office once a week for YEARS. They may still do it, pardon my ignorance. On a good week, they’d manage to gather “around 20.” But never any hint of a story in the media.

And this story on the tiny protest is written exactly the same way as a story about a big protest: it gives precious space, and significant weight, to an insignificant group of people. To be fair, it does mention the minuscule turnout in the second paragraph; but after that there’s no mention of what is, to any objective observer, the most salient fact: that almost nobody attended the “rally.”  

14 thoughts on “Why was this news?”

  1. Could be astro turf breaking through the spring snow.

    Darcy Johnston, owner of a consulting firm in Montpelier, is Vermonters for Healthcare Freedom’s executive director according to the Free Press.

    Her national group has managed Republican election campaigns in Maine, Rhode Island and Wyoming.

    From vtdigger:

    Her [Johnston’s] mini movement has – thanks to money from an unnamed source – migrated from the somewhat limited realm of social networking sites to a website and a burgeoning list of 200 donors, “friends” and supporters. emphasis added

    http://vtdigger.org/2011/03/29…

  2. Those war protesters were DFH who hated our troops(TM)(c) and were thus unworthy of discussion. These conservative patriots described in the article have the type of “back to basics” thinking that is clearly required in today’s troubled economy. The group could have been as small as one brave Paul Revere heroically shouting that the communists were coming (presumably bringing health care) and it will always displace the DFH article.

    Hope that clears that up for you.  

  3. Dog bites man, not news.  When you have a recurring weekly protest, it does cease to be newsworthy.  Teabaggers are a very small minority of this particular state, and they don’t show up for a weekly protest like it was their poker game.  When they come out from under their rocks (or leave the studio of True North/Common Sense Radio), it is newsworthy, whether you agree with them or not.  Not that i do.

  5. Healthcare freedom. I’d much rather leave the heavy lifting and profits for my health care choices to some fat white guys sitting around a board room table in some out of state office complex, rather than a board of my fellow citizens appointed by folks I can vote in and out of office.

    Freedom! Don’t tread on me and my rights to let my money and my fellow citizens money be vacuumed up and whisked out of state.  

  7. AP was taken over by an arch conservative several years ago.  He announced that AP was going to be more ‘balanced’, which means biased to the far-far right.

    So it’s no surprise that the far-right AP sends someone out to cover less than 20 anti-American extremists protesting the concept of Americans being able to get affordable health insurance in the Liberal state of Vermont.

    Will the AP report on any of the pro-labor April 4th events around the state?

  8. But for the (approx) 20 people outside- there were about 100 pro-single payer people inside the statehouse.  Yet that isn’t newsworthy- at least, not in the face of less than 2 dozen regressive’s.

  9. …it was an old war trick.  The Tea Party had only two people there, but they moved them them around the perimeter 10 times.  A Union Civil War general fell for that.

    Shit, when they can get a hundred together, it will be reported as 10,000.

    How many thousands of Tea Baggers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?  You folks do the punch lines.  Or did AP already do that?  

  10.  nation wide it seems the rule

    Last week, the press may have hit a new low with its out-sized coverage of the Tea Party’s D.C, rally and its “dozens” of attendees. Monday’s [today’s] union rallies across the country provide the media with a chance to show that it treats grassroots movements on the left just as seriously as those on the right.

    http://mediamatters.org/blog/2…

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